Dragon Army
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Dragon Army was the fictional play-army which Ender Wiggin was assigned to command in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.
The Battle School faculty conspired to make Ender's leadership seem as difficult as possible. Instead of inheriting an existing army whose leader was graduating, Ender was given only students who'd never been in an army or had been put up for transfer by their current commander (i.e. students who weren't considered any good). The name Dragon had previously belonged to an army which had been disbanded following a poor win-loss record. In the Ender's Shadow series, it's revealed that the army's initial roster was composed by Bean.
After its revival, Dragon Army never suffered a loss under Ender. Among the unusual challenges thrown at Dragon:
- Late notice of the battle, which gave the enemy five minutes to deploy into the arena without threat.
- Unusually frequent battles to induce fatigue: daily instead of biweekly.
- Combining two enemy armies into a single, double-strength enemy.
- Imbalanced arrangements of "terrain" to favor the opposing army.
- Automatic reanimation of "disabled" enemy soldiers.
Dragon pioneered several strategies and techniques in the Battle Room:
- Dragon was organized into five platoons ("toons"), each with eight soldiers, instead of the traditional four platoons of ten soldiers.
- The use of a sixth "special" platoon made up of members of other platoons for special tasks such as reconnaissance (this was Bean's toon)
- The use of an unbreakable cable to allow otherwise-impossible mid-air direction changes.
- Conceptualizing the game objective, the enemy's gate, as "down", to get past the ambiguous up-down orientation of the rest of Battle School.
- A new fighting position using the legs to shield the body.
Members of Dragon Army
Each Battle School army has 40 soldiers and one commander. Only the following Dragon Army soldiers were named in the Ender series:
- Julian "Bean" Delphiki - Special toon leader
- Han Tzu ("Hot Soup") - D Toon leader
- "Crazy" Tom - C Toon leader
- Fly Molo - A Toon leader
- Vlad - B Toon leader
- Dumper - E Toon leader
- Nikolai Delphiki
- Anwar
- Wu (Woo Hoo)
- Dag
- Seamus
- Ducheval
- SuriyawongTemplate:EnderThings